World Chess Championship

Broadway's latest production opens Monday with no actors, no script and a $100 top ticket price. If all goes well, the audience will sit in silence for five hours watching two men brood at a table over action so subtle that most patrons will have to catch it on giant-screen monitors and wear earphones to hear piped-in experts explain it all. Still, thousands of aficionados in New York and across the country are expecting a spectacular show...

Feb 13 (Reuters) - The United States and Russia, including their Soviet days, have one of the longest and most competitive rivalries in international sport, often fuelled by the political differences. Here is a look at some of the memorable showdowns and rivalries between the two sporting superpowers: - - - ICE HOCKEY Heading into the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, the Soviet Union was considered a virtual certainty to win the gold medal in the men's ice...

Garry Kasparov of Russia sped into a three-point lead in the world chess championship Tuesday, winning game 14 and declaring the fight for the title was over. After gaining a strong positional advantage out of the opening with the black pieces, Indian challenger Viswanathan Anand misplaced his queen in a tough middlegame. "The match is still on, but I think the fight for the title is over," Kasparov said at the post-game news conference. "Still, anything can happen and I...

CHENNAI (Reuters) - As India's Vishwanathan Anand squared off against Norway's Magnus Carlsen to defend his title as world chess champion, 11-year-old Shyamsundar and his 9-year-old sister Padmapratibha unfolded their cloth chess boards and sat cross-legged in the lobby of the hotel where the grandmasters were playing. Their mother, B. Tamilarasi, travelled with them 450 km (280 miles) from Madurai to Chennai, allowing them to miss school to watch the Anand-Carlsen matches...

Champion Garri Kasparov defeated former titleholder Anatoly Karpov in the fourth game of the world chess championship Tuesday and took a giant stride toward a successful defense of his crown. With three drawn games played, the setback means Karpov faces the formidable task of winning two more games than Kasparov, 23, in the remaining 20 matches of the $915,000 London-Leningrad competition. Karpov acknowledged the defeat in a telephone call to chief arbiter Lothar Schmidt and confirmed by letter.

ELISTA, RUSSIA -- Russia's Vladimir Kramnik on Friday became the first universally recognized world chess champion since 1993, winning a series of timed, tiebreaking games over Bulgaria's Veselin Topalov to take a tournament that reunified the title. Kramnik and Topalov, both 31, will each receive $500,000 for taking part in the tournament, which was arranged to heal a 13-year-old schism in the chess world dating back to world champion Garry Kasparov's withdrawal from the World Chess...

Defending champion Garri Kasparov outplayed challenger Anatoly Karpov in the crucial middle game Wednesday and appeared poised to win the second match of their World Chess Championship. After Kasparov's 41st move, Karpov sealed his reply in an envelope and the contest was adjourned until Thursday. With a one-pawn advantage, the 23-year-old champion was in a potentially winning position, although chess experts said it could still take considerable time. "It seems to me that Karpov...

Garry Kasparov had to settle for a draw with Vladimir Kramnik in Tuesday's Game 14 of the world chess championship, leaving the way open for the challenger to take the title Kasparov has held for 15 years. Kasparov got the advantage as Black and won a pawn. But he was unable to convert that into a win against the challenger's precise defense in more than five hours of play. The draw almost assures Kramnik the championship. Kasparov must win both of the two...

Garry Kasparov had to settle for a draw with Vladimir Kramnik in Tuesday's Game 14 of the world chess championship, leaving the way open for the challenger to take the title Kasparov has held for 15 years. Kasparov got the advantage as Black and won a pawn. But he was unable to convert that into a win against the challenger's precise defense in more than five hours of play. The draw almost assures Kramnik the championship. Kasparov must win both of the two...

Defending champion Anatoly Karpov defeated challenger Viswanathan Anand in two straight tiebreaker games Friday to retain the FIDE World Chess Championship title. Karpov and Anand had tied 3-3 in the six-game match, which was thrown into a tiebreaker Friday under a format that required them to play two games with a time limit of 25 minutes for each player in each game. Karpov won the first game Friday, playing white, and also dominated the second game, playing the...

CHENNAI (Reuters) - As India's Vishwanathan Anand squared off against Norway's Magnus Carlsen to defend his title as world chess champion, 11-year-old Shyamsundar and his 9-year-old sister Padmapratibha unfolded their cloth chess boards and sat cross-legged in the lobby of the hotel where the grandmasters were playing. Their mother, B. Tamilarasi, travelled with them 450 km (280 miles) from Madurai to Chennai, allowing them to miss school to watch the Anand-Carlsen matches...

The world chess federation said Friday it has dropped plans to hold its championship in Iraq and will hold the match in the southern Russian town of Elista. The federation, known by its French acronym FIDE, created a storm when it announced Baghdad as the site for the championship between American Gata Kamsky and Russian Anatoly Karpov. The United States denounced the proposal and refused to grant a travel visa to Kamsky, an American citizen. FIDE's president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, told...

Bobby Fischer, who became the first American to win the world chess championship, only to resign it undefended, will play a $5 million exhibition match here against Boris Spassky, the Russian he defeated for the title 20 years ago, a Yugoslav promoter said Friday. The match would end nearly two decades of seclusion for Fisher since he played Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, in perhaps the most publicized and widely followed chess match in the history of the game. It would also likely be...

Even in so protracted an event as a world chess championship, there may come a single moment when the weeks of tense play and all-night strategy sessions reach their climax and the outcome becomes stunningly clear. That moment arrived at a few minutes past 10 p.m. Thursday in the Tschaikovsky Concert Hall, where Garri Kasparov has been giving a virtuoso performance in his determined effort to wrest the world title from Anatoly Karpov. Karpov had already left the...